Saturday, August 29, 2009

High-school students' performance on the SAT college-entrance exam fell slightly, and the score gap generally widened between lower-performing minority groups and white and Asian-American students, raising questions about the effectiveness of national education reform efforts. Average scores for the class of 2009 in critical reading dropped to 501 from 502, in writing to 493 from 494 and held steady in math, at 515. The combined scores are the lowest this decade and reflect stalled performance over the past three years. The reading scores are the worst since 1994. Many observers viewed the flat results of recent years as discouraging in light of a more than 25-year effort to improve U.S. education. "This is a nearly unrelenting tale of woe and disappointment," said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. "If there's any good news here, I can't find it." Mr. Finn, a former education official in the Reagan administration, said he expected the results of the SAT and ACT - another college entrance exam - to add fuel to a movement among the nation's governors and school superintendents to come up with consistent national standards for high-school curricula. The SAT scores - which range from 200 to 800 - are closely watched because the standardized test measures the achievement of America's top high-school students. It is the most widely administered college-entrance exam. The fresh data are sure to figure into the debate over President Barack Obama's education agenda and potential changes to the federal No Child Left Behind law, which is up for renewal in Congress.

The Oslo Police have over the past three years investigated 41 cases of aggravated sexual assault, which resulted in rape. All of them were carried out by non-western immigrants to Norway. The police now urge that more efforts be put into preventive measures among men with immigrant background. The police have investigated all reported cases of aggravated sexual assault over the past three years, and have gained a clear impression of the offenders: Most of the rapists have a Kurdish or African background. The cases of aggravated sexual assaults all have one thing in common, namely the use of gross violence.

Fifty percent of California students are proficient according to latest test scores, but when you break the figures down by race, it’s quite a different story. About 70% of white and Asian kids are proficient, but only 36% of black and Hispanic kids are. And at the current rate of progress in closing the black/white achievement gap, it will take nearly 200 years before it disappears.

The BBC's Asian Network has become embroiled in a race row after Sikh listeners accused the flagship digital radio station of being insensitive towards their religion. The BBC was forced to remove a show from its website after Muslim presenter Adil Ray received threats from Sikhs who said he had denigrated one of their religious symbols. Members of the Sikh community complained that Mr Ray had been disparaging about whether they really needed to carry kirpan daggers. During the show, Mr Ray was discussing a Punjabi music concert in Canada where police had refused entry to Sikhs wearing kirpans.

Saturday, August 15, 2009

A new study in the scientific journal Nature reveals that some people actually have a rare genetic mutation that allows them to get less than eight hours of sleep without feeling groggy. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco studied the sleep habits and DNA samples of about 1,000 volunteers, only two of which actually had the mutation. Not coincidentally, the lucky pair was a mother and daughter. According to Ying-hui Fu, a neurologist involved with the study, the mother and daughter typically slept from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., feeling no adverse affects from their minimal six hours of sleep. Recognizing this genetic mutation is vital to the treatment of sleep disorders, which affect some 50-70 million Americans and add up to about $15 billion in medical expenses, according to the National Institutes of Health. Fu and her team also tested this theory with mice and fruit flies, breeding each to develop the DEC2 gene mutation that both the human mother and daughter in the original study exhibited. Just as Fu suspected, the mutant mice did sleep less, and their brain waves while they were awake indicated that they had, indeed, had a sufficient night’s sleep.

Youngsters with a different mother tongue form a majority in primaries in 13 out of 33 London boroughs and in nearby Slough. In inner London, 54% of primary pupils and 48.5% in secondary institutions do not speak English as their first language. This amounts to an astonishing 159,340 children. Across the country, English is a foreign language to more than one in seven primary youngsters - almost half a million. The figures from the Department for Children, Schools and Families point to the major demographic changes over the past few decades. Around a fifth of pupils are from ethnic minorities - up from 11% in 1997.

An African-American has pleaded guilty after being accused of impersonating a white supremacist in a fictitious Facebook account to make death threats against a black university student. Dyron L. Hart, 20, of Poplarville, Mississippi, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt to one count of communicating threats in interstate commerce, according to a Department of Justice statement. Hart admitted creating the fictitious account in November 2008, pretending to be a white supremacist outraged by the election of Barack Obama as the nation's first African-American president, the statement said. He then transmitted a death threat via Facebook to an African-American student at Nicholls State University in Louisiana, saying he wanted to kill African-Americans because of Obama's election, according to the statement.

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Former Representative William J. Jefferson has been convicted of using his office to try to enrich himself and relatives through a web of bribes and payoffs involving business ventures in Africa. A federal court jury deliberated for five days before finding Jefferson, 62, a New Orleans Democrat who served in Congress for 18 years until being defeated in 2008, guilty of 11 counts of bribery, racketeering and money laundering.

Researchers from the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London have found differences in the brain which may provide a biological explanation for psychopathy. The results of their study are outlined in the paper 'Altered connections on the road to psychopathy', published in Molecular Psychiatry. The research investigated the brain biology of psychopaths with convictions that included attempted murder, manslaughter, multiple rape with strangulation and false imprisonment. Using a powerful imaging technique (DT-MRI) the researchers have highlighted biological differences in the brain which may underpin these types of behavior and provide a more comprehensive understanding of criminal psychopathy.

The Brooklyn man arrested for organ trafficking in connection with a massive federal corruption and money laundering sting is described as a thug who reportedly pulled a gun on kidney "donors" who were getting cold feet. Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum allegedly bought kidneys from impoverished people overseas for $10,000 and turned them around for $160,000 in the United States. His operation was first brought to the attention of the FBI by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a University of California, Berkeley anthropologist who studied human organ trafficking. She described Rosenbaum as the main U.S. broker for an international trafficking network. One of her sources, a man who worked with Rosenbaum, said he would pull a pistol on nervous kidney sellers, telling them "You're here. A deal is a deal. Now, you'll give us a kidney or you'll never go home." Rosenbaum became part of the federal corruption probe, which netted more than 40 people, including rabbis and elected officeholders from New Jersey and New York, after an FBI informant crossed paths with him and learned of his organ trafficking operation. The informant introduced Rosenbaum to an undercover agent whose uncle supposedly needed a kidney transplant. According to the report, Rosenbaum described himself as a "matchmaker" who pulled off a lot of transactions. The scope of the probe extends well beyond Rosenbaum's trafficking operation, though. Tens of millions of dollars were allegedly laundered through Jewish charities and bribes were allegedly passed to New Jersey politicians, including three mayors, for shady development deals.

African American borrowers were 3.3 times as likely as white borrowers to be in foreclosure, whereas Latino and Asian borrowers were 2.5 and 1.6 times respectively more likely to be in foreclosure as white borrowers.

The rate of AIDS diagnosis for black women (45.5/100,000 women) was approximately 23 times the rate for white women (2.0/100,000). Data from the 2005 census show that together, black and Hispanic women represent 24% of all US women. However, women in these 2 groups accounted for 82% (8,807/10,774) of the estimated total of AIDS diagnoses for women in 2005. The rates of HIV diagnosis are much higher for black and Hispanic women than for white, Asian and Pacific Islander, or American Indian and Alaska Native women. The rates for black women are higher than the rates for all men except for black men.

According to a new Gallup poll, half of all Americans say immigration should be decreased - up 11 points from 39% in 2008. Some 61% of Republicans say they would like to see immigration decreased, up from 46% in 2008, compared to 46% of Democrats, up from 39%; and 44 percent of Independents, up from 37%. The poll also saw a shift in American attitudes toward whether immigration is a good or a bad thing for the country with more than a third (36%) saying it is a bad thing.

For years, the thickly forested hills and clear, deep lakes of eastern Congo have been a reservoir of atrocities. Now, it seems, there is another growing problem: men raping men. According to Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, United Nations officials and several Congolese aid organizations, the number of men who have been raped has risen sharply in recent months, a consequence of joint Congo-Rwanda military operations against rebels that have uncapped an appalling level of violence against civilians. Aid workers struggle to explain the sudden spike in male rape cases. The best answer, they say, is that the sexual violence against men is yet another way for armed groups to humiliate and demoralize Congolese communities into submission. The United Nations already considers eastern Congo the rape capital of the world, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected to hear from survivors on her visit to the country next week. Hundreds of thousands of women have been sexually assaulted by the various warring militias haunting these hills, and right now this area is going through one of its bloodiest periods in years.

Saturday, August 1, 2009

Using genetic material known as Ancestry Informative Markers, scientists can now determine an individual's continent of ancestral origin and can even distinguish Arab and Ashkenazi from Northern European population groups and Pygmy from other Sub-Saharan African population groups.

Red hair color is caused by variants of the melanocortin-1 receptor (MC1R) gene. People with naturally red hair are resistant to subcutaneous local anesthetics and, therefore, may experience increased anxiety regarding dental care. Scientists found that people with MC1R gene variants reported significantly more dental care–related anxiety and fear of dental pain than did participants with no MC1R gene variants. This means that dental care–related anxiety, fear of dental pain and avoidance of dental care may be influenced by genetic variations.

Scientists have found that evolution is driving women to become ever more beautiful, while men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors. The researchers have found beautiful women have more children than their plainer counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female. Those daughters, once adult, also tend to be attractive and so repeat the pattern. Over generations, the scientists argue, this has led to women becoming steadily more aesthetically pleasing, a “beauty race” that is still on. The findings have emerged from a series of studies of physical attractiveness and its links to reproductive success in humans. In a new study, Markus Jokela, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, found beautiful women had up to 16% more children than their plainer counterparts. He used data gathered in America, in which 1,244 women and 997 men were followed through four decades of life. Their attractiveness was assessed from photographs taken during the study, which also collected data on the number of children they had. This builds on previous work by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, who found that good-looking parents were far more likely to conceive daughters. He suggested this was an evolutionary strategy subtly programmed into human DNA. He cited two findings from the Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a US government-backed study that is monitoring more than 15,000 Americans. The measurements include objective assessments of physical attractiveness. One finding was that women were generally regarded by both sexes as more aesthetically appealing than men. The other was that the most attractive parents were 26% less likely to have sons.

The findings of the opinion poll conducted by Mori will come as an embarrassment to ministers, after Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, ruled out imposing a cap. Just 13% of those asked for their views on whether a "strict limit" on immigrant numbers should be introduced said that they opposed the move. Another 81% were in favor, according to the poll by Ipsos MORI for the UK Border Agency. There was also a sharp increase in the number who feared that immigration could have an impact on their own job prospects. More than two-thirds of those surveyed, 69%, said that they considered immigration to be a big or fairly big problem. Among this group, there was a 20% increase since the start of the recession in the number who considered that their position was at risk from immigrants. Two-thirds of respondents described themselves as fairly or very dissatisfied with the Government's handling of the issue of immigration, with a slightly smaller number, 64%, saying that laws should be tougher.

A five-year-old girl was beheaded by a neighbor who believed her sacrifice would help him and his wife conceive a son. Ram Niwas, 25, consulted his uncle a 'tantrik' or black magic priest, who told him he and his wife would only give birth to a boy if he killed a young girl in a ritual sacrifice. The body of Vandana was discovered in a field close to her home in a village in Lakhimpur Kheri district around 100 miles south of Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. Her body was surrounded by incense sticks which had been used in the tantrik ritual. Ram Niwas, his uncle, tantrik priest Mewa Lal, 55, and friend Yousef Ansari, 22, were arrested shortly after the discovery. A man beheaded his neighbour's five-year-old daughter after being told by his uncle, a self-proclaimed tantrik (witch doctor), that only a human sacrifice would enable his wife to give birth to a healthy male child. The gruesome ritual took place in a village in Lakhimpur Kheri district, 150km south of Lucknow. Ram Niwas, 25, who beheaded the child, his uncle, Mewa Lal, 55, and an associate, Yousuf Ansari, 22, have been arrested, the police said. The three men confessed to their crime shortly after the body was discovered, said local police station officer Ravi Srivastava. Niwas told detectives he had turned to his Tantrik uncle because he and his wife had suffered fertility problems. The case highlights India's chronic levels of female infanticide. An article in The Lancet revealed that 10 million female foetuses had been aborted in the last 20 years by women who wanted a son, while campaigners say many newborn girls are murdered at birth and recorded as stillborn. Girls are widely regarded as a financial burden by Indian families because of high dowry demands from the families of prospective grooms.

A Latina decapitated her newborn baby and ate pieces of his body before turning a knife on herself. Otty Sanchez, 33, has been charged with murdering her 3 1/2-week-old son, Scott Wesley Buchholtz-Sanchez. She then used a knife and two swords to dismember the infant and ate parts of his body, including his brain, before stabbing herself in the torso and slicing her own throat, San Antonio Police Chief William McManus said. "It's too heinous for me to describe it any further," he said. She was recovering from her wounds in hospital, and was being held on $1 million bail.